When Willie Jack unrolled a blue vintage carpet he bought at auction he thought it was never going to stop.
“It was magnificent but went on forever. I wondered how the hell we were going to get it in anywhere,” the Belfast publican recalls.
“It was rolled out once and rolled back up again for six years, I was frightened it was so big.”
It took eight men to carry the “New Ireland Carpet” from a Belfast cattle shed – where it was stored among straw and cows as Jack had “nowhere to put it” – for that first unveiling after being transported from a Kilkenny auction house in 2015.
“There was a massive Celtic design round the corners and I saw the first province – it could well have been Leinster – and I remember thinking: ‘Look at the richness of that colour.’ Then I saw the harp…”
Handwoven during the early 1960s in a Killybegs factory that supplied carpets for the Oval office in the White House, Buckingham Palace and Áras an Uachtaráin, Jack and his wife Joanne learned the piece was going under the hammer from an Irish Times article in July 2015.
Sitting on their favourite spot near Barleycove beach in west Cork, they started bidding.
“I hadn’t seen it in situ but thought: ‘That can’t leave Ireland.’ I was fed up with everything travelling to big apartments in New York,” adds Jack.
“I only know of one other Killybegs carpet, in the Great Southern Hotel in Killarney.
“We were bidding on the phone and I kept saying: ‘More, more.’ I wanted it back. In the end we got it for £23,000.”
Today, a pair of black slippers engraved with a ‘P’ sit beside the carpet – the centrepiece of a whiskey museum in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter which opened before Christmas.
A booming trading quarter over a century ago, the area was a no-go at night during the Troubles before being redeveloped into the city’s cultural – and most Instagrammed – hub over the past 15 years.
Pressing a buzzer beside a discreet black door on Hill Street takes you from cobblestones up tiny steps into softly-lit rooms housing the largest Irish whiskey collection in the world.
But it is the deep blue pile with its striking gold crest that is the focal point among the extraordinary array of bottles, antiques and silk ‘freedom boxes’ (given to those awarded freedom of the city status pre-1920) at the Friend at Hand museum and appointment-only shop.
“Everything had to fit around the carpet,” says Jack, owner of four Cathedral bars including the historic Duke of York (a pub for more than 200 years before it was blown up in 1972 and had to be rebuilt).
“Some people ask can they stand on the carpet. I roar, ‘Don’t stand on it!’ And then I give them slippers [the P stands for the Powers whiskey gold cup, 1969]. People have walked across it on the slippers.
“I like the idea when you go to the Far East you have to take your shoes off at the door – it’s about showing respect.”
Commissioned by the New Ireland Assurance company (a subsidiary company of Bank of Ireland) for its Dublin offices in 1964, the 13.7m by 5m carpet features a yellow-gold woven medallion with a harp and a crest of Ireland’s four provinces with an inner Celtic band; it is inscribed “Mo Dia – Do Dia, Mo Tír – Do Tír” (“My God – Your God, My Land – Your Land”).
Tiptoeing along its restored edges – my feet sink into the thick threads – the couple explain how specialists from London travelled to Belfast to cut part of it and bind it again.
“It’s sad but we had to think how much of the carpet we could put in without affecting the building’s support beams. People come in, walk through a little door and they see this massive harp and that message,” says Joanne.
“I liked the idea of ‘My God, your God’ … that could apply to anyone in Ireland.”
For Alana Kenney, who went to work in the Killybegs carpet factory for a summer job when she was 13 and remained there for the next 30 years (she never returned to school), a New Ireland-type commission would have taken months to complete.
Kenney is the only person left in the Co Donegal fishing town who undertakes carpet repairs and can make one “from start to finish”.
Founded in 1898, the factory closed its doors in 2009 following the economic crash though several of its looms – the world’s largest hand-knotted loom remains in Killybegs – are listed.
“My mum worked in it and even travelled to America in 1963 with a little loom to do demonstrations in the Lord & Taylor department store,” says Kenney.
“I loved the craft of it; I loved how pieces of thread and pieces of wool can actually make these luxurious carpets using a pair of scissors to cut the threads. It was very simple tools. There was no big machinery at all.”
Generations of the town’s women worked on the looms as it was “the only source of employment”, adds Kenney:
“The men were fishing, there was nothing for women. When the fishing season was stopped for the summer time, at least the women could go into the carpet factory and there was some kind of money coming in.
“The more knots you put in, the more money you got.
“I remember working on a carpet for the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, that was the biggest one I ever did. It was 38ft wide by 42ft long and one fitted piece that had to go round fireplaces. It took us nine months with 12 to 14 girls sitting on the loom.
“It was also a great social place. Mary Ellis would have been our forewoman. There were three or four retirement parties for her but she kept coming back.
“But it’s all lost now. I’m the only one left to do it. I’m 54 years old and I don’t want to see it lost either.”
Back in Belfast, Willie Jack is busy sourcing people to make new mats from the “tufts” of the New Ireland carpet.
“You don’t want these skills to die out. It’s sad pieces had to be cut but I would like to give them to people as gifts to say: ‘That’s a piece of history.’”
